09 March 2015

St Helen's Care Home

The original house was modest in size and it was built in
1831. It was part of Mile Oak Farm Estate and it was given the charming name of
Garden Cottage. There was no change in its structure for over 70 years but then
in 1913 nearby Portslade House became Windlesham House, a preparatory school
for boys. It was necessary to have a sick bay for any boy who might come down
with an infectious disease and Garden Cottage seemed the ideal place because it
was near the school but in a separate building. To cater for this new use a
single-storey extension was built on the south side facing Mile Oak Road. In
1915 a lounge was built at the south west end next to the 1831 dining room and
there were steps between them. At the same time a bathroom was added and a
bedroom was built north of the kitchen. In 1930 another bedroom was built on
the ground floor.

At first Portslade, or Southern Cross, as the head Mrs Scott Malden liked to call it, seemed well-suited as a
school location for young gentleman but as the 1930s progressed the spurt of
house building led the owners to search for somewhere more rural and in 1935
Windlesham House moved to Highden, near Washington in West Sussex where it remains
to this day.

Mr and Mrs Neild

Mrs Grace Dorothy Neild purchased
the cottage and erstwhile sick bay on 16 October 1935 for £300. At the same
time her husband Mr Neild bought a piece of land on the west side of the
cottage for £50. The intention was to have a house built on it but that never
happened. Instead the Neilds constructed a lovely sunken garden with a
centrepiece pond in the shape of a cross, Mrs Neild being a devout lady.

Mrs Neild was very proud of the
fact that she was the great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) who
became such a celebrated figure that when he died, he was buried in Westminster
Abbey. Darwin loved his garden and conservatories at Downe, Kent and it seems
Mrs Neild inherited those genes. She too created a beautiful garden; in the
spring there were masses of daffodils and at Easter she used to present a bunch
of them to people in the neighbouring houses of Mile Oak Road. There was also a
magnificent conservatory containing a grapevine, a peach tree and a hundred tomato
plants. The temperature in the conservatory during winter was kept constant by
warm pipes, the heat coming from a large boiler underneath a shed in the
garden.

Mrs Neild would invite two boys
from Portslade Industrial Schoolto spend Sundays with the family, which must
have been a great treat for the boys. They arrived wearing their
uncomfortable-looking uniforms and stayed for lunch and tea before Mrs Neild
took them back.

Mrs Neild was something of a
legend on her bicycle. She loved to travel that way to visit St Nicolas Churchon Sundays. She used to whizz down High Street at full tilt and expected the
momentum she generated to take her most of the way up the opposite hill without
having to peddle. Neighbours would hold their breath but she did not come to
harm.

She also possessed a Vauxhall car
(number PO 5559) and one memorable day in 1949 while trying to manoeuvre it
into the garage, she managed to drive straight through the back wall of the
garage (an asbestos panel) and ended up in the twitten. She got out of the car
unscathed but made sure someone else sorted out the problem.

In 1947 St Helen’s opened its
doors as a rest home. Convalescent patients were referred there from London
hospitals such as St Thomas’s Hospital, Guy’s Hospital and the Royal Free
Hospital. Sometimes there were more patients than there were beds at St
Helen’s. But that did not bother Mrs Neild who simply asked friends to help
out. Thus Mrs Lloyd (a relative of the Blaker family) of Windlesham Close took
one patient and others went to houses in Applesham Way and Mile Oak Gardens.
But all the patients came back to St Helen’s for their meals where Miss Maud
Baldwin reigned supreme in the kitchen. At that time there were fifteen beds at
St Helen’s and eighteen patients. Of course not all the patients at St Helen’s
had a bedroom to themselves and some of them were given a shared room.

In 1953 Mrs Neild fulfilled her
ambition of building a Chapel or Quiet Room on the premises. She managed to
raise revenue by writing to the various patients who had stayed there and
asking them to donate money. Revd Ronald Adams, vicar of St Nicolas 1948-1962,
was happy to present a fine, wooden cross for the altar. For many years the
vicar of St Nicolas would visit to hold a service of Holy Communion there on
Saturday mornings.

Mrs Neild had a twin brother
called Lance who also lived at St Helen’s. About the birth, he liked to say
that he arrived first to make sure everything was all right for his sister.
When his daughter was grown up, she took a great interest in transcendental
meditation.

During the war Mrs Neild was busy nursing at Chichester. In 1946 Mrs Patricia Shepherd arrived to
help out and she also kept the books. Mrs Shepherd was familiar with Portslade
because her husband Thomas Lewis Shepherd was owner of Shepherd’s Industries,
which moved from its previous premises in Davigdor Road, Hove to Portslade Brewery on 28 August 1937. At one time the company employed almost 200 people
and they made a variety of items from luxury shirts, castors, a special rubber
thread that was woven into cloth and a food product called Frittles Crisps.

A new Shepherd Shirt was heavily advertised in the 1930s
and the campaign started with the front page of the Daily Mail. The
shirt was sold in a wide range of patterns plus two detachable collars. The
collar was in fact an innovation. Whereas an ordinary shirt with detachable
collar needed two studs to keep it in place, a Shepherd shirt boasted a special
rim on the collar that automatically rested under a rim on the neck-band. There
was thus no need to use a back stud although a back-stud hole was incorporated
in case you needed to wear a different collar. The prices ranged from six
shillings and sixpence to twelve shillings and sixpence.

T.L. Shepherd died suddenly at
the early age of 39 in 1943. Mrs Shepherd struggled on with managing the firm
until the end of the war. She had previously been employed as an accountant at
Henley’s, London with a working day from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Their son Antony was born in
1940. His parents made the decision to send him with his nanny to the United
States of America for safety. They travelled with fourteen other youngsters
plus Miss Margaret Leechman, head of a Sussex Nursery School and Miss Barbara
Ravenscroft, a teacher at the school. The 20,000-ton liner in which they
travelled contained some 1,600 British refugee children and there were six
liners in the convoy attended by cruisers and destroyers. But Antony’s group
seemed to be the only ones destined for the States.

Their arrival caused quite a
stir, not least because Mr and Mrs Eugene Meyer were to be their hosts. Eugene
Meyer was editor and publisher of The Washington Post and so of course
that newspaper gave good coverage to the story. There was a large photo of Tony
in his carrycot and an enchanting one of two five-year old girls clad in their
Sunday best with becoming bonnets, and clutching large teddy bears. The
newspaper stated ‘Antony Shepherd, a blue-eyed infant of 5 months arrived in
what the English call a ‘carry-cart’, a basket affair with handles on either
side.’ Their destination was Clover Croft, a 200-acres estate in Virginia horse
country that Mr Meyer had leased for them.

The little evacuees received
attention from distinguished visitors. Lord Lothian British Ambassador to the
United States arrived in September 1940. He was pictured in formal suit, collar
and tie, trying not to look uncomfortable seated on the grass with the children
in front of a panoramic view of the peaceful Virginian countryside. In October
1941 the Duke and Duchess of Windsor came to visit the children. In the group
photograph of this historic occasion, young Tony, who was at the toddler stage,
seems about to run off while the others stand in formal pose. The Duchess
smiles over her bouquet but the Duke looks rather grim. The children also
visited the White House to take tea.

Tony returned home in 1945; he
never knew his father and his mother was a stranger who smoked. But he was used
to being away and was quite happy to board at school. First he attended the
Froebel School in Roman Crescent, Southwick and then he went to Keyes School (later
Shoreham College), which was just starting out and had precisely five pupils.
The head would drive these pupils in his Rover to eat their dinner at Sellaby
House, Portslade. Lastly, he attended Montpelier College, Danny Park from 1948
to 1951.

After her husband’s death, Mrs Shepherd kept in touch with Stuart Millar
who had backed Shepherd’s Industries. Mr Miller lived in Art Deco
splendour in his grey-brick mansion at what was once known as 1 Prince’s
Crescent and latterly as 157 Kingsway. Mr Miller was a millionaire who
had made his money from iron and steel in the Newcastle area and
subsequently became a tycoon and film director. He thought young Antony
was photogenic enough to appear in Tom Brown’s Schooldays but
unfortunately the idea was not taken up because the youngster had such a
strong American accent. Mrs Shepherd did not like the accent either and
despatched her son to elocution classes in order to get rid of it.

In 1947 there was a cold winter
and one day the double-decker bus 15B coming down Mile Oak Road began sliding
on the ice and ended up crashing into the wall at the top of High Street. Mrs
Neild heard the noise and phoned Conway Street Depot to tell them what had happened.
Then she set about making hot cups of tea for the stranded passengers.
Unfortunately, she too slipped on the ice and the tea spilt everywhere.

In 1947 or 1948 the Co-op Bakery van pulled by a horse was making a delivery to Portslade Industrial School when
something spooked the animal and off he shot with the van rattling behind him.
The van overturned on the same corner of Mile Oak Road and High Street and all
the bread fell off. The bread could not be sold and so it was all presented to
St Helen’s where good use was made of it and when it got stale it could be used
for such delicacies as bread and butter pudding.

In the summer the Girl Guides
used to hold a fete in the grounds of St Helen’s. On these occasions Mrs
Shepherd would don fancy dress and exercise her skills at palmistry. One year
she wore a fetching Aladdin-like costume of bright yellow with a circular hat
made out of a cut-down wicker basket base. Mrs Shepherd died in 1972.

Although the conservatory was
heated, there was no central heating at St Helen’s but there were individual
gas fires in the patients’ bedrooms. In 1960/1961 all this changed and central
heating was installed; a large coal-fired Ideal boiler provided the heat. The
coal was collected as necessary from a depot in Shelldale Road by means of a
homemade wheelbarrow, in fact it was a box on small wheels. This boiler did
sterling service and was only removed in 1988. The washing was despatched to
nearby St Marye’s Laundry up at the Convent.

Tony Shepherd left school at the
age of fifteen and became a ledger clerk at Findlater’s off-licence. In 1958 he
began training as a nurse and by 1971 he made arrangements with Mrs Neild to
purchase St Helen’s from her. First of all the finance had to be sorted out. Mr
Shepherd approached the National Westminster Bank in Boundary Road about a loan
but they were not at all interested and showed him the door. He then went to
the National Westminster’s branch near the Royal Pavilion and their attitude
was completely different. He was welcomed with open arms and thus he managed to
purchase St Helen’s for the sum of £5,000. There was however one proviso in the
transaction and this was that Mrs Neild could remain at St Helen’s because she
could not bear to leave; she wanted to stay on and hopefully die in her own
bedroom upstairs. She lived to celebrate her centenary and the stairs became
too much for her. But she stayed in her home, reached her centenary, and died
peacefully in the Chapel / Quiet Room.

In 1973 Mr Shepherd turned St
Helen’s into a Rest Home for local elderly folk and he continued to run it
until 1990. Then he decided it was time to sell the property and move on. His
wife died in 1995 and in the same year he became manager of the Bon Accord
Nursing Home in New Church Road, Hove, a position he held until 2006.

Meanwhile Mr and Mrs Sparkes had
purchased St Helen’s and continued to run the business. In 1995 they sold St
Helen’s to Mr R. Pinsent who ran St Helen’s Rest Home until 1999. By this time
there were eight residents aged between 70 and 93 and there were nine staff. Mr
Pinsent decided to close it down for a number of reasons including the
under-funding of residents. Then there were new Government guidelines
concerning room size, lifts and wheelchair access, which would be virtually
impossible to implement in such an old building with narrow passageways, stairs
and awkward corners. Five of the staff were made redundant and others went to
work in Mr Pinsent’s other care home Carlton House in St Aubyns, Hove. In 2001
St Helen’s became a private family house for the Pinsents and their three
children.

The Pinsents then endeavoured to
make use of the spare land at St Helen’s by redeveloping the site. On 10 June
2009 planning permission was granted to set back the flint wall, remove the
extensions and build five new homes.

This caused uproar with their
neighbours who felt it would be a gross over-development of the site besides
all the upset that would occur when building work started and the twitten, an
old right-of-way, would be blocked off. There were also questions about the
possibility of applying for listed building status. But the experts concluded
that although the kernel of the house dated back to 1831, it had been so
altered and extended that it no longer had the integrity of an original
cottage. It seems the flint wall, although old, was expendable too. In the
event the redevelopment never took place. Perhaps another factor in the
collapse of the plan was the necessity for the developers to do something about
the dangerous corner. At the very least, the flint wall would have to be set
back and pavements created with the inevitable road works and extra expense
incurred.

Some Residents at St Helen’s

Mrs Hart was once a stalwart of
St Nicolas Churchchoir, and in later years, the only alto. She insisted on
climbing the steep spiral staircase to the choir gallery wearing her choir
uniform of a depressing black robe and black mortarboard-style hat until she
was at an advanced age. Her husband Frank Hart had been a long-serving
churchwarden and they lived in Windlesham Close.

Mrs Winifred Field, formerly of
Cosy Cot, North Road, was a well-know figure full of energy, an inveterate
walker and interested in everything. When she was living at St Helen’s she
suddenly decided she must read Darwin’s The Origin of Species. A library
copy was duly provided for her but she had to admit she found it hard going.
She had a lovely double-aspect bedroom at St Helen’s, which enabled her to keep
an eye on the passing scene. Mrs Field was also a fund of memories concerning
Portslade in times past. She never forgot helping out at some event on
Portslade Village Green when her emerald ring slipped off her finger and was
lost. Perhaps she always hoped it might turn up one day.

Ethel Chandler was famous in
local annals for joining the Women’s Legion in 1915 (it was renamed the Women’s
Auxiliary Army Corps in 1917). She lived in the same house in Trafalgar Road
from 1912 until she came to live at St Helen’s. In June 1991 Ethel Chandler was
aged 96 when the Royal British Legion presented her with a Certificate of
Appreciation for her work during the Great War at a special ceremony. Also
present was fellow service veteran Elizabeth Dacre aged 90. Ethel Chandler was
still at St Helen’s when she celebrated her 100th birthday.

Ethel Chandler and her sister
Hilda stand out side 79 Trafalgar Road, Portslade where they lived for so many years. Tony Shepherd congratulates
Ethel Chandler on her 100th birthday.

William Grinyer was born in 1909
and he could remember when there were peacocks in the garden of Portslade
Grange, which was opposite the George Inn. Grinyer was present when an
interesting discovery was made on the 14th hole of West Hove Golf
Course; it was the last resting place of an Anglo-Saxon warrior. Grinyer also
helped to build the clubhouse.

Another resident was Joyce,
daughter of Cecil Renshaw Blaker, and the last of the once extensive Blaker
family to live at Portslade. She died at the age of seventy-nine.

Sources
Thanks to Tony Shepherd for his valuable recollectionsArgus
Middleton Judy Encyclopaedia of Hove and Portslade
Middleton, Judy Hove and Portslade in the Great War (2014)
Middleton, Judy Portslade: Britain in Old Photographs (1997)The Washington Post 24 August 1940The Washington Post 15 September 1940The Washington Post 20 October 1941